Navy doc awarded Silver Star

Hospital corpsman ignored his own wounds, gunfire

Navy Petty Officer 1st. Class Benny Flores stands at attention after he received the Silver Star Medal during ceremony for heroism in Afghanistan on April 28, 2012. At right is Marine Sgt. Major Harrison Tanksley.
— Charlie Neuman

Navy Petty Officer 1st. Class Benny Flores stands at attention after he received the Silver Star Medal during ceremony for heroism in Afghanistan on April 28, 2012. At right is Marine Sgt. Major Harrison Tanksley.
— Charlie Neuman

Perhaps no one is confronted more intimately with the horrors of war than hospital corpsmen and medics. When explosives rip apart a human body or stop a beating heart, the person the corpsman tries to save is often a friend or comrade.

Afterward, they often overlook the many they saved, haunted by the ones they couldn’t.

For Doc Flores, his own concussion and lacerations were serious enough to require hospitalization. He didn’t worry about that until he was airborne with the wounded in the medevac flight to Camp Bastion.

“Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Flores steadfastly refused treatment for his own wounds until all of his comrades were treated. By his extraordinary guidance, zealous initiative, and total dedication to duty, Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Flores reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service,” according to his citation signed by Gen. James Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, on behalf of the president.

Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jason Flores, a Kiowa helicopter pilot in the Army, couldn’t believe they were talking about his little brother when he heard about it. Doc Flores had always been generous, always willing to spot his brother some cash, always the last to leave after cleaning up from a party. But what he did that day in Afghanistan, “It touched my heart,” Jason Flores said.

When he was wounded, Flores was two months into his tour, his third combat deployment after previous ones to Iraq and Kuwait. His wife Jerianne, his high school sweetheart and mother of their 4-year-old daughter, wanted to choke him through the telephone line when she found out he chose to remain in Afghanistan until the end, Flores said.

He stayed because of the bond between the Marines and their corpsman. “We’ve got to take care of each other.”

Before he left Afghanistan he started wearing a black metal memorial bracelet to Pruitt. It adorns his wrist even now.

“I wish we all came back,” Flores said. He thinks about Pruitt almost every day, always wondering “if there was anything I could have done more.”